🔒 Let's End the Self-Defeat of Platform Shaming

With all that’s been happening in the news lately—and that’s a lot—the last thing I have patience for is discussion about independent journalist Mehdi Hasan being a Nazi. 

Hasan has copped this from every side of politics. You don’t get to be a left-wing British-Indian-American Muslim floating between mainstream and independent journalism without exploding some heads trying to define you politically. His positions on Gaza have his right-wing opponents threatening him snidely with pager bomb semi-jokes.

But he’s been facing the Hitler accusations from the left as well. Whenever Hasan opens his mouth in criticism of Elon Musk, progressives are quick to point out that he’s building his media empire, Zeteo, on the Substack platform, which to many is kind of the modern equivalent of borrowing Goebbels’ typewriter.

Anil Dash, whose recent life mission seems largely oriented around full-throatedly atoning for being a serial tech CEO, is a quick-draw sheriff on Bluesky, identifying and discrediting Substack-havers on sight. But I don’t want to pick on him, he’s just one of the louder voices among many progressives who will not abide having a good healthy rage discussion ruined when some guy comes along and poops a link to his Substack on it.

 And I get it. These things are like the Nespresso of blogs. They all kinda look the same and everybody has one. It’s quick and it’s convenient and it’s easy for people to use without any kind of technical or design or branding or promotional knowledge.

 Easy to use is also almost a universal shorthand for low quality. If your service allows people to set up and start broadcasting their opinions to the world in five minutes then it’s going to produce a lot of opinions that took far less than five minutes of thought.

 But the Nazi association of course comes from Substack management’s regular and consistent tendency to trip over their own dicks when it comes to PR disasters. I was shrieking at them just recently about their latest fuckup. The specific accusation of Nazism dates back to the end of 2023 when they gave a catastrophic response to media reports about the prevalence of white supremacy content hosted on their platform, but throughout the year the hits kept coming. Almost one year to the day of the initial Nazigate fiasco they again dropped their pants, turned around, and with dramatic and deliberate poise, showed their entire ass by announcing an official professional partnership with one of their flagship publications, Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, a notoriously partisan right wing garbage tabloid. They might as well have said they were going all in for Breitbart.

 And for some reason the grievances regularly bring up the prominent presence on the platform of Richard Hanania, one of the co-founders of the Alt-Right movement who now writes at length on race and IQ pseudoscience.

Substack management could very easily stop stepping on rakes every five minutes and just kind of sit back and quietly run their business like Reddit admins who only emerge from their burrows to make a shitty announcement once a decade, long after everyone has forgiven and forgotten the last one. But techbros just gotta slurp that techbro lemonade. They gotta slurp it up. It’s like a tic. And I don’t want to make this about me but anecdotes are what I’ve got and every time one of these guys says something aloud that they could have used their inside voice for my subscriber count craters and I have to abstain from sharing any Substack links for an undefined number of weeks due to embarrassment.

 So here’s the thing about Nazis, platforms, and my evolving thoughts about all of it in the age of Elon Musk running a fire sale on the whole of western democracy.

 I write an identical version of this same newsletter on both Substack and Ghost, and each week I tell every single person reading this that they’re more than welcome to sign up to either platform to receive the exact same content. Initially, I decided to do this after a bunch of people told me that they would sign up as paid subscribers if only they could support me on a non-Nazi platform.

 The initial hurdles were that both of the other major Substack competitors (Ghost and Beehiiv) take an upfront fee from the author rather than a cut of subscriptions, and you can’t really tell which one is going to be better than the other until you either roll the dice with one, pay the toll, and either regret it or not. I went with Ghost, ultimately, my scales being tipped by the unique premise that they might ultimately decentralise the platform, which I think is essential for the future of the internet.

I’ve been very clear for the past three months that anyone who doesn’t want a cent of their money going to Substack is free to join me at Ghost instead, and guess how many of those aforementioned conscientiously objecting potential supporters have followed through with their pledge? Here’s a clue: I can count them on one… uh… finger.

Now I want to be clear, this is not about money. This column is free and it always will be, I just want my voice to get out and operating across multiple platforms maximalises that. I don’t regret spreading onto a second platform, but for now that has more to do with the fact that I fear Substack will collapse and some sort of contingency really seems wise.

 I’m no longer particularly bothered by the ethical ramifications of maintaining a presence on Substack, and to explain why, I need to talk a bit about the political history of the British Indian Ocean Territory.

No, seriously. I promise that this will make sense but I need you to bear all the way with me here.

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